Five Good Reasons To Eat Less Meat

Reducing your consumption of factory-farmed meat can be good for you and the rest of the planet.

Posted
Friday, December 6, 2019 2:53 am

(NAPSI)—The next time you’re planning a family meal, a party or just a little snack for yourself, consider this: Reducing your meat consumption can have a multitude of benefits.

Why To Avoid Meat

Here’s the explanation from Joe Loria, Meat Reduction Campaign Manager of World Animal Protection, a global nonprofit whose mission is to have a world where animals live free of suffering:

1) It helps your health: From reducing cancer rates and heart disease to showing an increased overall lifespan, by consuming more plant-based foods you’ll be helping to improve your own health.

2) It helps fight climate change: Factory farming is one of the leading causes of climate change and deforestation. Simply cutting back on the amount of meat you consume can combat climate change.

3) It helps farmed animals: Of the more than 70 billion animals farmed annually, 50 billion of them spend their lives on factory farms. There, they’re treated more like machines than like living, breathing, feeling creatures. They endure short, miserable lives and are often confined together in cages, crates or pens, which prevent them from engaging in natural behavior. Reducing your meat consumption will make a huge difference to the lives of these animals and free-up resources.

4) It protects wildlife: Grazing land and feed crops now use more than a third of Earth’s entire landmass. This rapid loss of habitat means critical species are disappearing at alarming rates. Many experts warn a mass extinction is on its way.

5) It helps fight hunger: There are nearly a billion starving people on the planet, while it takes 16 pounds of grain to produce just one pound of beef. By reducing your meat consumption you can help alleviate the waste associated with factory farming.

Not eating meat can also help prevent slave labor and sexual abuse. Workers on factory farms are in many cases treated almost as cruelly as the animals. These workers are often subjected to workplace hazards, including life-threatening injuries, respiratory illnesses, PTSD, and exposure to dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria. You can help stand up for these exploited workers by reducing your meat consumption and withdrawing financial support from companies profiting from poor labor practices.

Change Starts With You

To protect your health, your planet, your fellow human beings and animals, it can be a good idea to dramatically reduce your consumption of meat. Fortunately, that need not be a hardship. There are plenty of tasty, nutritious plant-based alternatives and protein sources such as “clean meat.”

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